A Manifesto For Music Technologists

March 21-23, we held the first Music Tech Fest in North America at Microsoft Research New England. It was a three day bonanza of ideas spanning a mind-bending spectrum of ways to connect music and technology.

The day after, 21 scholars met for a symposium we called What is Music Technology For? Our goal was to write a manifesto. Today we are proud to announce the launch of the Manifesto. As we say on the about page:

Those at the symposium were motivated by a passion for music, a fascination with technology and culture, and a concern for how music technology is now developing. Recognizing the fertility of music technology as a subject that bridges computational, scientific, social scientific and humanistic approaches, we looked for common ground across those fields. We debated and developed a set of shared principles about the future of music technology.

Built from the notes of that day’s event, and revised together in the weeks that followed, this manifesto is the collaboratively-authored product of this meeting.

Read more about the manifesto and who was involved on the about page. We hope those of you with overlapping interests in music and in technology will sign on.

About Us

The Social Media Collective (SMC) is a network of social science and humanistic researchers, part of the Microsoft Research labs in New England and New York. It includes full-time researchers, postdocs, interns, and visitors. Beginning in 2009, the researchers who now lead the initiative are: Nancy Baym, danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary Gray. Our primary purpose is to provide rich contextual understanding of the social and cultural dynamics that underpin social media technologies. We use a variety of methodologies and span multiple disciplines.

Subscribe by Email!

Enter your email address to subscribe to the SMC blog. You'll get an email when we update the blog.